


Turning Points (New Friends)

by Krasimer



Series: Without a Trace (This Was Done In Silence) [5]
Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, The violence tag is a sensitivity warning, Umbrella and Murkoff are sister corporations, Waylon meets one of Umbrella's projects
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 16:44:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14815077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krasimer/pseuds/Krasimer
Summary: “One of my friends,” he gestured vaguely at his temple, hoping Chris would find it funny. “Told me about something, once upon a time. Told me about a group of ‘Soldiers’ called the Constellations project. Supposed to be better than normal people, go in and win wars for those who had them in their arsenal.”





	Turning Points (New Friends)

Waylon heard a branch snap in the cluster of trees off to his right, bringing his knife up to defend himself, listening closely for more noises.

He had the blade turned out, aligned with the length of his arm, ready to lash out if necessary.

Chris’s presence sparked in his awareness, at his back and to the left, and he spun on his heel and struck, rabbit-quick. He didn’t even realize his eyes had fallen shut until he opened them and saw what looked to be a teenager with his knife through their palm. Their other hand was moving quickly towards their hip, reaching for their own weapon. He had a moment to take in the somewhat ragged clothing that hid their body shape and the almost animalistic snarl shaping their mouth before he grabbed their wrist.

This would have been easier if he still had Miles to back him up in a fight.

Feeling something like an apologetic murmur coming from Miles’s presence, he snorted out a laugh. “Okay,” he looked at the person opposing him. “Are you a kid?” he asked them, frowning when he saw them looking behind him.

Blue eyes snapped back to him, immediately full of hatred once more.

“If I pull back my knife,” he said in a quiet voice. “And you pull away your weapon and I let go of you, are you going to attack me again?”

_You smell of **them**._

Waylon blinked a couple of times, his jaw dropping open. The voice had sounded like it had come from inside his own mind. “Who is ‘Them’?”

_Torment. Pain. Angry. All the time angry. They hurt us, they hurt us!_

It sounded like three voices this time.

“Who is ‘Us’? I’m not here to hurt anyone. I was just trying to hide from someone,” Waylon felt his knife shift a little, looking at it. He nearly dropped it in shock: their hand was already healing, or at least attempting to, around the blade still in their skin. “I’ve got this big corporation trying to kill me. They…” he hesitated, still watching their hand heal. “They altered me. I’ve got a creature in my head called the Walrider. All I have left of a friend of mine, actually. Well, I mean…He’s still in my head too. Sarcastic bastard that he is, sometimes.”

They blinked, looked him up and down, then pulled away.

The knife slipped out of their hand and it healed within seconds. “Can you talk?” he asked them.

With a shake of their head, they opened their mouth. A quiet, gasping moan came out, a strangled sound that might once have been a voice. When they closed their mouth again, the voice in his head came back.

_Our siblings call us Altair. We are one-of-four. The eldest._

“Altair, huh? What about your siblings, what are they called?” Waylon shrugged when they looked at him. “Feels rude not to ask. I don’t know the protocol here. Kind of my first time dealing with this sort of thing.”

Something occurred to him then.

Honestly, he could have kicked himself for it. “Your name is Altair. Telepathy is…A new trick. For me, at least. Never met anyone with it, didn’t know people could have it. But you,” he looked at them. “Someone did that to you, didn’t they?”

_Yes._

“One of my friends,” he gestured vaguely at his temple, hoping Chris would find it funny. “Told me about something, once upon a time. Told me about a group of ‘Soldiers’ called the Constellations project. Supposed to be better than normal people, go in and win wars for those who had them in their arsenal.”

_We are not weapons. We refuse to be weapons._

“So, you are them,” Waylon nodded slowly. “My name is Waylon. I’m guessing that the four of you…Haven’t spoken to people in a while. Just each other. Forgot how, even.” He paused and Altair nodded. “How long have you guys been out here?”

_Years. Maybe even decades. How long has the world gone on since we were children?_

“I’ve heard you were sixteen when you went missing.” Waylon made a face, trying to calculate in his head. “And I’ve seen the report on you. Born in nineteen-ninety-three…So you went missing sometime in two-thousand and nine…Maybe as late as a year later…We’re currently in twenty-sixteen.” He looked Altair in the eye for a moment, frowning. “So you guys have been out of the world for six or seven years. You’re about twenty-three-years old now.”

_Adults._

“Yeah,” Waylon rubbed at the back of his head. “Someone owes you a lot of birthday presents.”

Someone took Waylon’s left hand in their own and he turned to look at them. It was someone who looked identical to Altair except for the slightly softer cheeks and the somewhat more defined curve in their hips. “Oh,” he said quietly. “You’re one of the four, right?”

They nodded.

 _My name is Polaris,_ came the softer whisper. _Two-of-four._

A hand prodded at the small of his back and he knew, without looking, that it was another one of them. “Let me guess, three-of-four?”

_Castor._

“So, we’ve got Altair, Polaris, Castor…” Waylon looked around, frowning. “Shouldn’t there be a fourth one?”

Polaris’s mouth curled into a frown as well, their hands clasped together in front of their chest. Castor seemed to be bracing for impact, looking towards Altair.

 _Alnilam is his identical. We were made in matching sets. Polaris and Castor work best together. Altair and Alnilam work best together._ The two at his sides exchanged a brief glance. _Alnilam is not well._

“What do you mean?”

 _Their heart beats slower every day. They barely stand, barely move anymore. Everything is pain._ Polaris’s eyes were shining, liquid and ready to burst into tears. _They are in pain and we cannot fix it. They are dying and we cannot fix it. When one dies, all four may die. Half of a matched set is unable to work properly without the other half._

Waylon nodded. “Can you take me to Alnilam?”

Altair’s eyes seemed to go darker as they narrowed and Polaris’s upper lip peeled back in a silent snarl. _If you harm them, we will **destroy** you._

“I understand that,” he told the three of them. “I just want to see if there is anything I can do to help them.”

The three of them exchanged a glance, likely having an entire conversation in the time it took. After what seemed like an eternity, with Eddie’s presence at his left shoulder, Waylon watched as Castor nodded and stepped forward to take his hand. Polaris took his left hand again. Altair walked in front of the three of them, seeming to be leading the way.

Another eternity passed as they moved through the forest. Waylon spent it looking at the scenery, trying to figure out where they were and where they were going.

His leg ached.

His cane was back in his jeep, somewhere, and he had stashed his jeep to avoid being detected. With a small sigh, Waylon pushed away Miles’ annoyance at him calling the jeep his. What use did a dead man have for material possessions, anyway? It was Waylon’s now.

Why couldn’t he just be glad that it was safe?

Looking at the three guiding him along, Waylon could understand how they had forgotten how to talk. Being quiet and on the run, that had been the first step. Stay silent in the forest both for the purposes of not getting caught and for being able to hunt. Telepathy had given them a way of communicating without giving away their position.

And they had spent about seven years with no one but each other to speak to.

With very little warning, they were suddenly inside of a camp. From the outside of it, it had only looked like more foliage. A bend in the small river that ran through, thickened bushes and trees.

Inside was a small home.

There were three bed-shaped areas that were empty and one that was occupied. Altair broke away from the three that stood and left their siblings with Waylon for a moment, kneeling down to press their hands to the throat and wrists of the person laying in the fourth bed.

 _Alnilam_ , Polaris’s voice echoed through his mind. _Sick. Dying. Can you help?_

“I’ll see what I can do,” Waylon answered. “I was a programmer, before everything happened, so I don’t know how much I _can_ do, but I will do what I can.” He kneeled down next to them, swallowing his nerves as Altair watched his every move. He slid the knife back into his boot.

Alnilam seemed to shift away from his hands, muttering about the cold.

“Have they been able to drink any water?” he asked the three watching over him and them. “Any sort of fluids?”

_Not for some time._

He glanced at Castor. “Alright. When did they start acting like they were sick?”

_A week ago. System purge, unconsciousness. Hasn’t eaten since. It has been three days since they were able to drink water._

“So we’re reaching dangerous territory, got it.” Waylon nudged Alnilam’s chin up, checking their pulse. It was slow and worryingly faint, like they were already slipping away. Their eyes didn’t even open as he checked on various things – pulse, temperature, reflexes. For all intents and purposes, they seemed to practically be dead already.

‘ _Something inside,’_ Chris’s voice hissed to him. ‘ _Listen to that beeping.’_

Waylon paused, then leaned down and put his ear to Alnilam’s stomach. If he listened carefully enough, he could hear something faintly beeping. It might have been more accurate to say that he felt the beeps – each one pulsed across his mind like a wave meeting the shore. “I think,” he told Alnilam’s siblings. “That I might have to cut open her stomach.”

**_NO._ **

Waylon staggered under the combined weight of three voices screaming into his head at once. “There seems to be something inside of her,” he told them. “Something that I think might be causing the damage and the sickness. If I cut her open and pull it out, what are the chances she’ll heal shut within a few minutes?”

Castor and Polaris were snarling silently at him, looking like they were reaching for weapons. Altair, however, held up a hand to stop them.

_How do you know?_

“I can hear something inside of her,” Waylon told them. “And I can feel it pulsing. It’s sending out electromagnetic waves, I think. Or something like that. Whatever it is, I can feel it.”

Altair studied his face a bit more, narrowed eyes and clenched fists.

_Do it quickly._

Waylon nodded, pulling the knife Chris had advised him on back out of his boot. When the three of four that were still upright settled on the ground around their sibling, he took a deep breath and then hesitated. “How easily can we sanitize?” he asked them.

 _Our bodies do not allow for bacteria,_ Polaris leaned forward and put their hand on his wrist. _If you are going to do this, do it now._

With another nod, Waylon pushed Alnilam’s shirt off of their stomach, keeping it covering the rest of them. From this close, it was obvious Alnilam was one of the female-bodied two of the four, so it was a necessity to keep their body covered. With his free hand, Waylon felt their stomach, grimacing at the feeling of something hard underneath the skin.

Wondering how the fuck he’d gotten to this point in his life, Waylon pressed the knife in and sliced through skin.

It took a minute to find the beeping device, but he found it. It was about the size of a grape, buried in skin and muscle and sewn into place. Someone had gone in and stitched it to Alnilam’s insides. With a wave of nausea hitting him, Waylon carefully cut the stitches and detached the wiring.

Alnilam moaned in pain, their eyelids fluttering.

Waylon moved back, waving the siblings forward. “I think I can figure out what this is for,” he told them. “Just…Give me a minute. Look after your sibling. Make sure they’re alright.” He pulled off his backpack and yanked out his laptop, nearly fumbling it in his haste to get it out. Once it was out, he pulled up his recording software and took a short video of the device, along with several pictures. “This,” he told the camera, “Was found in the stomach of someone. Not in the actual internal organ, but in the muscle-and-sinew layer underneath their skin.”

He closed out the camera, saved the video, then put the device on a fairly flat rock. Waylon sighed as he set down his laptop and stood up.

He brought his boot down on the device with a heavy thud and a sharp snap of it _shattering._

On the bedroll, Alnilam suddenly threw themself upright and backward, clutching desperately at their stomach and making panicked noises. Waylon turned to look at them. “It’s okay,” he told them. “I’m actually trying to help you.”

Altair nodded and seemed to say something to Alnilam, clutching their face in their hands. After a moment, Alnilam relaxed, leaning into their sibling before looking up at Waylon again. Their eyes were tired, exhausted and angry and scared all at once.

 _Thank you_ , came a new voice. It was deeper than Polaris’s, just by a little, but he could hear the difference.

“You’re welcome,” Waylon told them.

With Alnilam awake and aware, the other three seemed to have calmed down. Their eyes were a little less wild when he looked again, and Castor actually smiled. The four of them seemed content to sit together and casually have a limb thrown over a limb, entangled in a pile of bodies and hair. It was a sweet scene, Waylon decided after a minute, if he didn’t pay attention to the blood that all four of them were wiping off of Alnilam’s stomach.

“I think the device was disabling Alnilam, somehow.” He started after a minute of them engaging in what was essentially a puppy pile. “Was there something about them that pissed off the people that did this to you? Did they ever threaten Alnilam, when they were experimenting?”

 _Many times,_ Alnilam’s voice was tinged with laughter. _I was the carrot; our tormentors were the stick._ _Keep on good behavior or your **sister** gets hurt._

He could feel the disdain when they said the word ‘sister’. Alnilam hated being identified as female, he could tell that much. “Did they ever say anything about using you to keep the others in line?”

**_Yes._ **

Alright then, Waylon thought as he studied all of them. “…Do you four think you could stop living in the forest and come with me?” Four pairs of eyes pinned him with the same intense gaze, the same exact shade of electric blue that didn’t look natural. The four siblings were watching his every movement. “I’m trying to destroy both companies; the one that did this to you and the one that did _this_ ,” he gestured at himself, getting the Walrider to manifest for a moment. “To me.”

The quadruplets grinned, the same almost-evil smile, all at once.

 _We can help you with that,_ they told him.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you guys are still reading.


End file.
